” Nick Gillespie and Matt Welch’s The Declaration of Independents, published in 2011, provides a hopeful outlook for the future of freedom, a vision of how libertarian politics can fix America’s problems. How did 2013 pan out for the libertarian moment upon us? Here are seven pieces of good news for freedom this year from some of us here at Reason. – Ed Krayewski

1. No Tolerance for Zero Tolerance

WHNSAs 2013 began, America was still reeling from a mass murder at a Connecticut elementary school. Parents and officials across the country were nervous that something similar might happen in their backyards, and that nervousness translated into a series of strange school security scares, many of them involving absurd zero-tolerance decrees. The most infamous might be the second-grader in Maryland who was suspended for chewing a Pop-Tart into the shape of a gun.

It was easy to assume that the reign of zero tolerance was just going to get worse, as school districts felt the same bureaucratic imperatives that swept the nation after the Columbine massacre of 1999. It didn’t help that both liberals and conservatives were calling for measures that had fed the zero-tolerance beast in the past. But then something unexpected happened. Those silly security scares were mocked in the press. Politicians proposed bills to roll back zero tolerance’s excesses, and schools across the country adopted new policies that might not be a civil libertarian’s dream but at least give officials more flexibility in doling out punishments and make it less likely that a misbehaving student will be pushed into the criminal justice system. As victories go, these may be small, but a year ago I didn’t expect this to be an area where there would be victories to celebrate at all. —Jesse Walker “

” Fox Business Network has announced that former MTV VJ Kennedy (full name Lisa Kennedy Montgomery) will host a new primetime show beginning next Monday, Dec. 9th.

The show, called The Independents, will air Monday through Wednesday and Friday nights at 9 p.m. ET, featuring a roundtable discussion on news-of-the-day with an emphasis on economic and civil liberties, in keeping with the host’s libertarian beliefs.

Kennedy will be joined by two co-hosts: Reason magazine editor-in-chief Matt Welch and America’s Future Foundation’s Kmele Foster. The show will also feature a rotating panel of experts.”

… Q&A with Freedomworks’ David Kirby

Published on Oct 5, 2013

” “We’ve noticed in the last fifteen months an uptick in the number of people who are actually self identifying as libertarian,” says Freedomworks’ David Kirby.

Kirby sat down with Reason magazine’s Editor-in-Chief Matt Welch to talk about why more people describe themselves as libertarian, how politicians like Senator Rand Paul and Congressman Justin Amash have come to think of themselves as libertarian and whether Glenn Beck calling himself libertarian is a good thing.

Held each July in Las Vegas, Freedom Fest is attended by around 2,000 limited-government enthusiasts and libertarians. Reason TV spoke with over two dozen speakers and attendees and will be releasing interviews over the coming weeks. Go here for an ever-growing playlist of this year’s interviews.

Judge Alex Kozinski: From Communist Romania to the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals

“Those of you who’ve had the good fortune to be born in the United States simply have not known the absence of freedoms,” says Judge Alex Kozinski, Chief Judge of the U.S Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit. “You can only imagine, but not experience, what it’s like to live in a society where these freedoms are absent.

“Born in 1950 to Holocaust survivors, Kozinski grew up as a committed communist in Bucharest, Romania. On his first trip outside of the Iron Curtain, in Vienna, Austria, he experienced forbidden luxuries like bubble gum and bananas. It was his first taste of freedom, and it caused him to become, in his words, “an instant capitalist.

“Today, Kozinski is responsible for some of the most influential – and controversial – legal decisions in the United States. Kozinski’s rulings have challenged the Obama administration over the issue of same-sex marriage. In a case that tested the limits of parody and artistic expression, he has weighed in on whether a Barbie doll qualifies as a sex object. In one of the most influential dissents in recent memory, he caused federal prosecutors to drop all charges against a defendant who’d been convicted of smuggling of illegal immigrants across the U.S.-Mexican border.

Kozinski sat down with Reason editor-in-chief Matt Welch during Reason Weekend in Las Vegas for a wide-ranging discussion about freedom and the law. How do mobile phones and cloud computing affect our right to privacy? Why do judges interpret the commerce clause of the U.S. Constitution so broadly? What’s wrong with the practice of jury nullification?Kozinski, a self-described libertarian, answers these questions, and many others, with the insight and wry humor that comes from decades of experience on the bench – and a childhood under communism.”

“Atlas Shrugged Part II, the second of three films based on Ayn Rand’s controversial 1957 novel, hits movie screens across the country on Friday, October 12, 2012. (For more information on the film, go here.)”

“The party of government refuses to even entertain the possibility that we can no longer afford it”

“The speeches at last night’s kickoff of the Democratic National Convention in Charlotte were notable less for what they contained and more for what they did not: any engagement with the issue of having a debt load (of $16 trillion) that is now larger than GDP, of having a long-forecasted entitlement time bomb marching northward toward 100 percent of federal spending, of having underfunded obligations in the trillions of dollars promised by politicians addicted to handing out “free” benefits.”

“The country’s political class frets that Americans don’t understand how good this president has been.”

“Something interesting happened to political journalism on the night of Republican vice presidential nominee Paul Ryan’s speech at the GOP National Convention. After months and even years of grumbling that, as Grist‘s David Roberts tidily put it this summer, “The left’s gone left but the right’s gone nuts,” mainstream journalists and self-described “fact-checkers” declared that Ryan had crossed over some brand new threshold for un-truthiness, and that they were no longer going to stand idly by and pretend that both major parties were equally prone to telling lies.”

It’s time for our government to mind it’s own damn business , which it is none too good at by the way , instead of minding ours .

” 3) Because it really is none of your damned business . This applies more to Joe the Plumber than Mitt the Romney (politicians, and especially presidential aspirants, deserve to be held to a higher standard), but the ugly truth as it stands today is that Uncle Sam believes he has a right to know each and every detail about your
money, so long as it is parked in a foreign financial institution instead of buried in your back yard. There is something very wrong about
the principle that your after-tax earnings are subject to still more scrutiny by the most powerful government the world has ever
known, and something insidious about the sight of politicians blaming Americans’ investment
choices for their own shoddy governance. “